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Sunday, August 23, 2015

Eye HEART Stockholm

We took our family vacation to Stockholm this summer, and while I knew it would be a beautiful city, I was really surprised how much I liked it. From the trendy cafes of Soldermalm, where we stayed in an ideally located Airbnb apartment, to the tangled alleys of the Old Town, the constant flow of people watching, the food, the nature, the good friends we were visiting, the ubiquitous playgrounds for kids - it all added up to the perfect family city trip.But one of the things that surprised me most is that Stockholm is exploding with sticker art. There's not a lamp post or street sign in the entire city that doesn't have at least one sticker stuck up on it, each depicting something equally random, each in a different state of decay.

We walked an average of about eight kilometers (five miles) a day, which isn't bad with two small kids. And in this time my eyes were constantly pulled to the sign posts and the mostly meaningless yet anything-but-mundane messages on their stickers.

You can't read too much into these things (if you can even read them at all), but part of the fun was wondering why someone would go to all the trouble of designing and having this or that sticker made, then making the effort to go out and plaster it all over the town. Was it that important? (Back in the day, I certainly thought it was. Check out my one contribution to the sticker art world here)

This one was good:

The ones that caught my eye the most though were the ones looking back at me. I'm sure there were many more out there, but here is a collection of 10 stickers I caught staring: